Drivers need to be more cautious, no matter what a pedestrian may be doing.

Note: GJEL Accident Attorneys regularly sponsors coverage on Streetsblog San Francisco and Streetsblog California. Unless noted in the story, GJEL Accident Attorneys is not consulted for the content or editorial direction of the sponsored content.

Despite continuing Vision Zero efforts in L.A. and other cities, 352 pedestrians were killed in California last year. That is an eighteen percent decrease over the year before—which is nothing to dismiss. But the trend was far from universal, and the tendency across the nation was for injury numbers to go up. And even with this modicum of good news, California still has an above-average per capita fatality rate.

The GHSA sees the rise of cellphone use as one possible cause of this trend. But while distracted driving is definitely a growing problem, so is car-centric street design that leaves pedestrians stranded, lack of driver education and training, and bad driving habits like speeding.

Two recent campaigns point in the right direction. One was created by a family whose young son was killed in a crosswalk in Berkeley nine years ago and has since then been working to prevent similar tragedies. They founded the Zachary Michael Cruz Foundation, which works on pedestrian awareness campaigns and funds scholarships for UC Berkeley students.

On the anniversary of their son’s death a few days ago, they organized an event at the intersection where Zachary was killed in a crosswalk by a left-turning driver who didn’t pause long enough at a stop sign.

The family, joined by representatives from the police department and state Office of Traffic Safety, stood on the sidewalk and held up signs that were hard for drivers to ignore.

“Drive Like Your Kid Died Here,” they read.

Berkeleyside quoted the boy’s father as saying that the idea behind the campaign was “to reimagine and reinvigorate [pedestrian safety] and to challenge motorists to really think about their behavior.” The foundation also launched a website to map where people have been killed on the roads by drivers, and to tell the stories of the people whose lives have been cut short.

Another similarly to-the-point pedestrian safety campaign was highlighted recently by Treehugger. [Insert Loved One Here] was thought up by the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain to drive home the message that dangerous streets and dangerous driving have the potential to hurt the most vulnerable among us.

It’s easy to become numb to the perniciousness of bad infrastructure when we see it and navigate it every day. But the sight of a too-narrow bike lane or a crosswalk with a car encroaching into it is one thing; imagining your own loved ones in those vulnerable spaces between heavy vehicles has a way of un-numbing the imagination.

The site provides a very simple photo editing tool that lets you add an insertion point on your own photos to call out where you probably don’t want to see your loved ones. It’s a way to create an extremely personal safety campaign that would be hard for people like, oh, say, that neighbor of yours that habitually runs the stop sign on your street, to ignore.

It’s not a total solution, of course. All the public relations campaigns in the world are no solution for problems caused by bad road design, lack of education, and increasingly easy distractions. But they won’t hurt.

All of those things you describe have involved more changes than just “please don’t do x”…

And in fact, you too disagree with the OP. The OP didn’t ask for “education, enforcement, engineering”, he asked only for “education/enforcement”.

Dimwit Lamb

Slow down? You’re supposed to come to a full stop before entering the intersection and making a right on a red light. A large number of deaths caused by not stopping at all.

Wanderer

This, fortunately, is not true. People’s behavior cannot be perfected, but it can be improved. There is much less drunk driving than there used to be. Cigarette smoking has been hugely reduced in the US. After the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, business discrimination went down. Safer roads require education, enforcement, and engineering.

Those two (design and enforcement) aren’t mutually exclusive, nor are they exhaustive, nor is the violence of car users is limited to crashes. It also includes several forms of pollution, for which the appropriate response in some cases will be banning (e.g., leaded gas, and eventually human drivers), regulating (e.g., stricter requirements for a license), and taxing (e.g., gas, VMT, parking, congestion). The last (tax) is by far my favorite, but I’ll take progress on any and all!

Why don’t we? Because any “policy” that requires humans to “just do” something different, is guaranteed to fail. You cannot fix people. You can fix roads. Even if you implemented that policy, it wouldn’t stop people from getting killed. We might all feel a little better about a little vengeance, but at the end of the day, pedestrians are still going to be killed.

chandru

I get sick of these discussions about whether better infrastructure can reduce ped. deaths. Maybe.

Why don’t we put th blame where it belongs: on drivers (and I speak as a long-term driver wh enjoys driving.) If you have restricted vision turning, slow fucjing down. If you think there may be a hidden pedestrian or cyclist, slow the fojk down!

It’s time to have draconian responsibility laid on driver: You hit a pedestrian in a crosswalk, you go to jail. First time. No questions asked.

What will it take to enact this type of law? It’s the norm in many European countries.

“Active Transportation in California: The Non-Motorized Transportation Facilities Report Fiscal Year 2016-17,” highlights Caltrans' achievements of the past year as the department works towards its fast-approaching goals to increase the share of trips made by walking and bicycling in the state.